The Secrets To Success - Will Smith

Here is a Video where Will Smith speaks about his success. Will Smith is one of the people who helped me believe in myself and I find him inspirational .

7 Reasons Why You’re Not Making Money Online

Making money on the internet is similar to the American dream. You have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.

The hard part is those last three character habits — hard work, determination, and initiative.

Making money online has this appeal of “getting rich quick.” Believe me, I wish it were true but it’s not.

There are a handful of obvious patterns I see people fall into that prevent them from adding some green to their wallet.

Let’s address those patterns, kill them, and create new, more empowering ones.

7 Reasons Why You’re Not Making Money Online

And….blast off.

1. Your Mindset Sucks

Some people are raised to have a rock-solid mindset and others have to create it for themselves.

The ones who make it are in control of their thoughts and they allow the Universe to work in their favor. They always see progress where others would see failure.

They see opportunity where others see misfortune.

They read personal development books and listen to audios that strengthen their willpower and desire to succeed. Meanwhile, others watch TV and let their brains turn to mush.

They push past struggle and hold onto the reason why they got started in the first place.
Others never had a strong enough reason to hold onto in the first place.

They remove any exit strategy; there is no plan B. Success is the only option.
Others are always thinking, “I can always fall back on my job if this doesn’t work out.”

If personal development is not a part of your daily routine then I HIGHLY suggest you add it in. It will only serve you for the better.

2.) You Don’t Have A Mentor

The fastest way to see success online is to find a mentor who has what you want and do exactly as he did.

Join him in his business opportunity, purchase his products, ask him questions, and model everything he does. Success leaves clues, but most people are so ego-driven that they want to do it their own way.

You wouldn’t re-invent the wheel would you? No, you would just use the one that exists because it has already been proven to work.
The same goes with building a successful business online — find a system that works and use it.

Only tweak it later when you are seeing results and you are experienced enough to make those changes.

 3.) Your Attitude is Rubbish

I hate complainers.

They always blame their situation on outside circumstances, and they never take ownership over anything.
They are the kings and queens of making excuses and they love pointing the finger.

If you can’t take responsibility for where you are in life at this very moment they you aren’t ready for this business.
The position your are in is a direct result of what you have done in the past 30 days.

If you hate your position then change your habits. No one needs to hear your whining or pity stories. Stop playing the victim card and create your own circumstances.

Only focus on what you can control.

When I sold internet door-to-door, I had no control over the weather, other people’s attitude towards me, the traffic, the territory, the income levels of the residents, etc.

I did have control over my own attitude, my work ethic, the length of my lunch break, my pitch, etc.

With internet marketing, I only focus on what I can control and I detach myself emotionally from everything else.

I can control how many blog posts I do per week, how many YouTube videos I record, the frequency of Facebook posts and emails to my list, making sure my on-page SEO optimization is correct, etc.

I can’t control how many people like, comment, or share my posts, if Google decides to move me a few spots down in the search results, if someone on my team decides to quit, etc.

The bottom line: focus on the controllables NOT the uncontrollables.

4.) Too Much Learning, Not Enough Applying

I live by the 3:1 ratio, which is that I spend 3 hours applying for every 1 hour of learning.

You will retain a skill much quicker this way, and you will avoid one of the biggest plagues in this industry — information overload.

I see people studying for hours and hours trying to learn every nook and cranny, loophole and angle about a topic before they start applying it.

This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

You have to accept that you will never know everything. Trying to be perfect is just a form of procrastination.

The best way to master a topic is through trial and error. Take imperfect yet massive action and tweak the formula as you go.

5.) Trying to Master Multiple Traffic Sources

It is too easy to spread yourself thin.

I scroll down my Facebook wall and I see people gloating their success on Instagram, YouTube marketing, Facebook marketing, Google SEO, Craigslist marketing, Forum marketing, Solo ads, Facebook PPC, and so on and so forth.

I used to get big-eyed and follow the wave, but I would never see any results because I was spending a tenth of my time doing ten different things instead of focusing on just one.

I started to get results once I scratched everything but blogging.

I wanted to become the go-to guy that specialized in everything blogging and SEO related, and now I have people reaching out to me all the time for help with their blog and SEO.

Only when I mastered blogging did I decide to move into YouTube marketing, and now I am mastering that.

So pick your favorite traffic source and do it every single day until you become a master. Only then should you move onto a second traffic source.

6.) You Suffer From Shiny Object Syndrome

Ooooo there is a new product or business opportunity that just launched and it sounds amazing!!

Everyone is hopping on the bandwagon, so you think this is your chance to get rich with a brand new startup — getting in at the beginning!!

What happens next month when the next shiny object launches and everyone rides the wave? And then the next month and the next month?

All of a sudden you are buying every new product and joining every new business opportunity on the market.

Now your subscribers on your email list have no idea what direction you are going in because you are promoting a new opportunity every day, so they unsubscribe from your list and you are now out hundreds if not thousands of dollars because you can’t make up your mind.

This is a vicious cycle that a lot of internet marketers go through.

In fact, I almost fell into this trap when I first got started, but I caught myself before falling too deep.

Find a company or product that you truly believe in and stick behind it 100%. You will have more peace of mind and your followers will trust you more.

For me, it’s the Internet Lifestyle Network and My Top Tier Business.

7.) You Lack Consistency

Building an online business is like rolling a snowball down a mountain.

You have to start small and keep pushing it down the hill until it picks up enough momentum that it runs on its own and evolves into a giant snowball.

When I first got started, I wondered why I wasn’t seeing any results. I looked at my daily production and it sucked.

I was blogging once every two weeks, spending most of my time watching training videos and paying attention to other successful marketers instead of paying attention to my own business.

Once I focused on blogging everyday and making 3-4 YouTube videos a week, my traffic spiked big-time and my blog was slowly climbing up the Alexa rankings and in the search engines.

Stick to the 80-20 rule (the Pareto Principle). Figure out what 20% of your inputs generate 80% of your outputs.

Watching training videos and studying other successful marketers is necessary, but only to a certain extent. It certainly wasn’t bringing me more traffic, leads, or sales.

So I cut all the filler and focused on blogging, YouTube videos, and emailing my list. Those were my income producing activities.

So do an internal audit of your own business and find out where you are wasting time and where you should be spending your time.

Summary

Use this list to plug the leaks in your business.

Don’t neglect personal development and training your mind. This is inner game stuff that will effect your outer game and producing results.

http://tipsfromtim.com/not-making-money-online/

Smart Passive Income: 10 Top Tips From Expert Pat Flynn

In February 2007, Pat Flynn was working at an architecture firm making $38,000 a year. He mulled boosting his earning power by getting an architecture license, but the process would likely take six to eight years. When he heard about getting a credential in sustainable design and environmentally friendly building called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), he decided to go for that, as no one in his department had it. The one problem? The exam was so challenging, just one-third of test-takers passed.

To make studying more fun and to increase the chances he would actually understand the material, he decided to create a blog about preparing for the exam. After all, in order to explain the subject to others, he would need to understand it himself.

Having the blog allowed him to participate in other forums about the exam, and he found that the more he discussed the topic, the firmer grasp he had on it. In March 2008, he aced the exam, was immediately promoted and began earning $60,000.

But two months later, with the economy slowing down after the financial crisis, his firm began laying people off, and Flynn was informed that after his current projects were finished, he also would be out of a job. At the same time, he couldn’t help but notice that in the LEED exam forums he had frequented, people were referring to him as an expert and directing questions his way. He began to think he might capitalize on that.

Pat Flynn with his family (Courtesy of Pat Flynn)

He decided to investigate how to turn his blog into something bigger, and so turned to Google Analytics to track visitors. What he saw floored him. “Little did I know it but this little website I created to help me pass this exam was generating thousands of visits a day,” he says.

In June, he put ads on his site with Google Adsense, and within the first hour, earned $1.08 with three clicks. He earned $5 the first day, $7 the second, and then eventually began pulling in $15-$30 a day. In October, he created an ebook exam study guide priced at $19.99. By month’s end, he earned $7,906.55 — more than he had ever previously earned in a month.

“My initial thoughts about doing business online before or about the industry in general was that it was a scummy, scammy, car salesman-y, hype-y type of industry. And here I was actually making money online, providing value,” he says. He was hooked.

Now, six years, 12 websites, 100,000 email subscribers and 9.5 million podcast downloads later,  Flynn, 31, has earned roughly $2.7 million dollars online with “passive income” strategies.

Flynn, who blogs at Smart Passive Income and discusses his secrets at the Smart Passive Income Podcasts, defines passive income as “building online businesses that take advantage of systems of automations that allow transactions, cash flow and growth without requiring a real-time presence. We don’t have to trade our time for money one to one. Instead, we invest our time upfront, creating valuable products and experiences for people, and we reap the benefits of that time invested later,” he says, adding, “It’s not easy. I just want to make sure that’s clear.”

From what he describes, creating passive income definitely does not sound easy. It requires a serious ramp-up — often requires 80- to 100-hour workweeks in the beginning, says Flynn. But once up and running, and depending on the content, some sites take fairly minimal maintenance. The LEED exam study site he launched in 2008, takes just him four to five hours a month to maintain but brings in $250,000 annually.

Flynn shared his top tips for getting started generating your own passive income.

1. Before you begin, ask yourself, “Am I doing this just for the money?” 

Being able to generate passive income largely depends on your audience, and if they detect that you care more about making money than serving them, you won’t succeed. “Whenever I’ve seen people do something just for the money, they’ve failed because their intentions aren’t driving them in the right direction. It should always be about helping people and about the passion of making others feel better. The byproduct of doing that is generating money,” says Flynn.

2. Be prepared to put in serious time upfront.

“I don’t believe the overnight success exists. There’s a lot of hard work and time involved beforehand,” say Flynn. Angry Birds may have seemed like an overnight success but it was the 52nd game that Rovio created. Flynn says it took him a year or year and a half to build audiences for his most successful sites.

3. Banish the thought that once you’ve created the product, you can sit back and buff your nails.

“There is no such thing as 100% passive income,” says Flynn.“Even with real estate you still have to manage your properties, or even with the stock market, which is potentially passive income, you still have to manage your portfolio. With online business, there is no such thing as 100% passive income — and this is coming from a guy with a blog called Smartpassiveincome.com .The definition of passive income is ‘building these businesses of automation,’ but in order to keep them automated and keep that trust going with your audience on top of that, you do have to keep it up every once in a while — so a lot of time upfront and a little time after. But there is alway time involved.”

4. Still want to do this? Then find a market you can help.

“Where a lot of people mess up is they try to build a business or create a product that serves everybody, and by trying to serve everybody, you serve nobody. You have to specialize and niche down and find a market with a pain point that you, based on your experience, based on your education and based on your passion, can help,” he says. Your earnings will directly reflect how well you serve that particular audience, and the more your message resonates with them, the more opportunities you’ll have to sell to them.

5. Before you dive in, consider whether you’d be happy serving this market this several years from now.

Don’t pick a topic just because it’s hot. If you can imagine yourself happily writing on this subject and coming up with new products in this space five or 10 years from now, that ups your chance of success.

6. Find out how that audience is already being served — and what gap you can fill. 

Don’t get scared off if others are already in the space. “I think that actually validates what you want to do,” says Flynn. “There’s a market out there. I wouldn’t see those other bloggers as competition. I would see them as opportunities to befriend people — people you should become friends with anyway.”

But then figure out your unique selling proposition, what advantage you can offer that the market currently lacks. “My advantage in the passive income marketing space is that I’m not afraid to share my failures or where my income comes from,” says Flynn. “Transparency is huge,” he says. Referring to the personal bio on his LEED exam site, he says, “You might think I’m not benefitting from putting my story on there, but it helps me establish a relationship with people there. I’m someone who went through the same experience people went through on the site.”

One way to begin to figure out where you fit would be to freelance, says Flynn. Although it wouldn’t provide you passive income, it would expose you to the problems of your target audience and show you how you could help. 

7. Build your platform.

Now that you’ve chosen your market, find a way to start sharing your message, whether it’s a blog or podcast or Youtube channel, or whatever platform makes the most sense for your target market. Flynn says this is where you’ll start to build a fan base — and collect subscriber emails. You don’t need to get the whole world to follow you to make this work out financially. Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly wrote an article about 1000 True fans which basically says that if you have 1,000 people paying you $100 a year, that’s a $100,000 a year. “You don’t need to serve everybody,”says Flynn.

Use your base to build your audience, and when you’re staring out, take advantage of the fact that you don’t have a big following to give more personalized help to your first fans. “The people who are starting out — that’s their advantage,” says Flynn. “They have the opportunity to speak directly with those people few coming their way to find out what their problems are and give them the special treatment that bigger brands might not be able to do.”

8. Offer them value for free. 

You can’t start charging right off the bat without your audience knowing anything about the value you offer (though you could still indirectly earn money from them with the right ads). “The best way to go in terms of a long-term passive income business [is] delivering value and information for free, and therefore establishing expertise, knowledge and trust with your audience,” says Flynn.

9. Figure out what product will best serve them. 

Once your audience has grown and you have validation that you’re offering them value, there are many ways to create passive income. You could sell digital products like ebooks or courses, take up affiliate marketing in which you promote other company’s products and earn a commission when you sell that item to your audience, build a community and charge people to be a part of it, create software and sell that, among other avenues. Ask your audience directly what would serve them best, or look at what they’re saying on Twitter, Facebook or other websites, to find out what problems they have and how you could help solve them.

Flynn has created many different products. While his LEED exam is what got him started, he has both earned a commission from selling other people’s products and offered a commission to others who would sell his wares, and also recently created his first software, after realizing that most online podcast players offered only the basic stop/start/volume features. He hired a development team to create a superior one, which was a success from day 1. “We sold out 250 beta licenses in less than 24 hours, because I was addressing a need but also, I had built up an audience and trust with them … When you build that amount of trust with your audience, whatever you come out with, they will love.”

If you’re worried about launching a new product, and think you might need some feedback to make it really good, Flynn recommends “pre-selling” an idea — for instance, offering a limited number of spots or seats into, say, a course you create and giving the test group specialized attention so you can see how to improve the content. Once it’s revised (or, if it’s software, once all the bugs are removed), you could open it up to your whole audience.

10. As you start to make money, remember tip 1 — that profit shouldn’t be your main motivation.

Once you start to see some success, don’t be led astray by the money. While Flynn does use affiliate marketing to make money, he only ever recommends products that he has personally used and likes. He is inundated by offers to earn $50 per sale through commission on products he has never even tried. “I’m like, ‘I don’t even know you, I don’t know what this product can do, and I don’t know if this product will help my audience.’ I only use products I’ve used before, because that trust you have with your audience is the most important thing in the world.” He says if you do recommend a product for the incredible commission but your audience has a bad experience with it, your credibility will be shot.

“The moment you start to do things for money, the moment you start to lie in your sales marketing copy, the moment you start to put dishonesty in your work is the moment you should reconsider why you’re doing that work in the first place,” says Flynn.

In order not to succumb to that, Flynn says it’s important to know your motivation. “Passive income is important to me not just for the financial security but so I can spend time with my family,” he says. “I’ve been able to work from home and witness all my kids’ firsts. I have a one-year-old and a four-year-old, and that what drives me and gets me pushing through those hard times and why I keep creating new products and why I want to help other people do the same thing.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/08/26/smart-passive-income-10-top-tips-from-expert-pat-flynn/